A compilation of scenes from The Floyd Radio Show.

John Prine’s ode to the loss of a Kentucky town to coal mining and environmental hazards gets a good cover from singer/musician Mike Mitchell and musicians Bernie Coveney, Abe Goorskey and Chris Luster at Oak Grove Pavilion in Floyd, Virginia. Photos from my personal collection.

Performed at The Floyd Radio Show.

Bluegrass legend Sam Bush performs at FloydFest.

Lots of changes on the Floyd scene as the old year rings out:

Lawrence Wood is closing the funeral home that bears his name.  Wood has buried a lot of people in Floyd County, including my maternal grandparents. He’s been a fixture around here for a long, long time.

Protocol Automotive is becoming “Joe’s Garage,” reflecting the name of owner Joey Kaylor and perhaps also reflecting Kaylor’s continuing legal problems.  He faces trial next year on a 14-count embezzlement charge.  The Commonwealth of Virginia claims Kaylor diverted funds for employee withholding for other purposes.  Is the name change part of a defense strategy?  We will have to wait for the trial.  Kaylor, the self-declared “hateful” mechanic, isn’t keeping a low profile.  He held a “customer appreciation day” at Protocol after his indictments and applied not once, but twice, for open positions on the county’s Economic Development Authority, citing his experiences in dealing with the many challenges of running a small business in Floyd County.  He didn’t get either appointment.

The Tea Party became a county-wide laughing stock when it tried to pack a public hearing on the proposed comprehensive plan with claims that the plan was a tool of the United Nations.  A lot of talk but little change in the plan, which will be discussed at the board of supervisors meeting in two weeks.

A lot of controversy over proposed wind turbine farms on Wills Ridge and possibly other places in the county.  The county board narrowly passed a proposed ordinance banning ridgeline development — including wind farms — but the ordinance faces what is expected to be a turbulent public hearing on Jan. 31.  If the county could harness all the hot air generated in the debate it could produce enough geo-thermal energy to power all the homes and businesses here.

The Floyd Country Store is curtailing its hours, starting next week, going from a six-day a week schedule to Thursday-Sunday.  The store expects to expand back to a fuller schedule when the tourist season kicks in.

The National Music Festival held its first season with critical acclaim, finished the year in the black and then packed up and left town for the Eastern Shore of Maryland, leaving some contributors feeling conned.

The Wine Tasting Shop at the Station on South Locust packed up and left.  Owners are still looking for someone to occupy the space vacated by the County Health Department and other vacancies in the complex.

Our old space at The Village Green — home for a brief while to a bicycle shop — remains empty.  It’s a nice corner location but the vacancy is a sign of the times not only in Floyd but elsewhere.  Floyd has fewer empty business spaces downtown than most communities. For that we can be thankful.

On The Run at the Exxon Station is now a Circle K.  Same owners, just a different name. Circle K bought the national On the Run chain from Exxon.

The video store is gone.  The Harris & Baker building remains empty.  Internal dissension continues to affect Angels in the Attic.  Prices are up and customers report often surly service from the new crop of volunteers brought in after the old timers left in a dispute with Kathy Blackwell.

Longtime school superintendent Terry Arbogast left under a cloud amid questions about his salary and a lack of accountability in public disclosure.  New school boss Kevin Harris is still getting his bearings.

The local elections put two new faces on the board of supervisors (Lauren Yoder and Joe Turman) as longtime supervisor and board chairman David Ingram lost out to Yoder in the primary and fell short in a write-in effort.  Challenges to two school board incumbents fell short.  Sheriff Shannon Zeman survived two opponents — a disgruntled former deputy and an Indian Valley resident with no law enforcement experience who said God told him to run and assured him he would win if he did.  No word yet from God on why his candidate lost.

Crime is up, court dockets are crowded and the crystal meth epidemic is spiraling out of control.  The sheriff’s department is busting a record numbers of meth labs.  Meth, it seems, is the new moonshine in Floyd County.

It’s been that kind of year.

Ron Paul: Newsletters? What newsletters? (AP Photo)

Texas Congressman and perennial Presidential contender Ron Paul changed his story again on his involvement with the controversial newsletters bearing his name published in the 1980s and 90s, telling a radio caller Thursday that, yes, he did write a “certain portion” of the material.

After claiming he “didn’t write them” and “didn’t see them” before walking off a CNN interview a week ago, Paul took another turn in his history of changing stories and told a caller on WHO-AM radio in Iowa:

Well, the newsletters were written, you know, a long time ago. And I wrote a certain portion of them. I would write the economics. So a lot of what you just mentioned… this would be material that I would turn in, and it would become part of the letter. But there were many times when I didn’t edit the whole letter, and things got put in. And I didn’t even really become aware of the details of that until many years later when somebody else called and said, you know what was in it? But these were sentences that were put in, a total of eight or ten sentences, and it was bad stuff. It wasn’t a reflection of my views at all. So it got in the letter, I thought it was terrible, it was tragic, you know and I had some responsibility for it, because my name went on the letter. But I was not an editor. I’m like a publisher.

Let’s take a closer look at Paul’s non-denial denial.  A week ago, he acted like he had absolutely nothing to do with the newsletters even though he defended the comments back in 1996 when questioned by the Dallas Morning News .  He claimed in 1996 that the racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic remarks were “taken out of context.”

In the 2008 Presidential campaign, when Capitol Hill Blue questioned him about the newsletter, he claimed he had “little to do” with writing or producing them.  Last week, he said “I didn’t write them, I didn’t read them and I disavow them.” Was he talking about the entire content of newsletters or just the questionable parts?  He didn’t make a distinction last week.  It appeared he was trying to disassociate himself from the newsletters altogether.

Now, once again, he’s admitting he wrote “a certain portion” and that “I didn’t edit the whole letters,” which suggests he edited at least some of them. He also says he has “some responsibility” for what appeared under his name.

Some responsibility? This from a small-time on-again, off-again Texas Congressman who claims he didn’t know what was being published and distributed under his name for 20 years and who now wants us to think he can run a country?

On the radio show, Paul says it wasn’t until “many years later” that “somebody else called” and told him about the racist comment and other slurs in the newsletters.

That is a lie.  The “somebody else” who called was Catalina Camia of the Dallas Morning News Washington bureau.  She called him in 1996 about the content of the newsletters after questions were raised by Paul’s opponent in his race to return to Congress after a 10-year absence.  The opponent found some of the racist comments in a 1992 edition of the Ron Paul political report but a review of several years of the newsletters by Capitol Hill Blue found some of the comments raised as a campaign issue were also printed in editions less a year earlier.  At the time, Paul didn’t deny writing the words, he just said they were “taken out of context.”

Wrote Camia on May 22, 1996: “Dr. Paul denied suggestions that he was a racist and said he was not evoking stereotypes when he wrote the columns. He said they should be read and quoted in their entirety to avoid misrepresentation.”

Key words here.  Camia wrote “he wrote the columns.”  Did Paul call up the Dallas Morning News and claim she misquoted or misrepresented his comments about writing the columns?  He did not. Did he or his campaign then say he “didn’t write the columns?”  They did not.  Paul did not start claiming he didn’t write the stuff until five years later.

Paul also claimed in a radio interview in Dallas that his newsletters had nothing to do with his campaign to return to Congress in 1996.

Carmia found otherwise. She wrote on May 22, 1996: “A phone call to the newsletter’s toll-free number was answered by his campaign staff.”

Another lie by Paul.

Paul continued to publish the newsletters for another 10 years and a review of issues published since they became a campaign issue in 1996 shows far more than “eight or 10 sentences” that contain homophobia and antisemitism.

Paul claims he isn’t a racist and close friends say they’ve never heard him utter a racial slur but he has no qualms about benefiting from the company of racists or anti-Semites.  He bragged to Ed Crane, president of the CATO institute that his “best source for congressional campaign donations was the mailing list for the Spotlight,” a racist, anti-Semitic tabloid published by Willis Carto, who claims the Holocaust never happened.

James Kirchick, a fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a contributing editor for New Republic, notes that Paul pals around with conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and continues to hold extremist views that are far outside the mainstream.

Noting that the Republican Jewish Coalition did not invite Paul to its Republican Presidential candidates forum, Kirchick writes in the conservative Weekly Standard:

While Paul’s views on Israel certainly place him outside the American, never mind Republican, mainstream, there is an even more elementary reason the RJC was right to exclude him from its event. It is Paul’s lucrative and decades-long promotion of bigotry and conspiracy theories, for which he has yet to account fully, and his continuing espousal of extremist views, that should make him unwelcome at any respectable forum, not only those hosted by Jewish organizations.

Kirchick adds:

No conspiracy theory was too outlandish for Paul’s endorsement. One newsletter reported on the heretofore unknown phenomenon of “Needlin’,” in which “gangs of black girls between the ages of 12 and 14” roamed the streets of New York and injected white women with possibly HIV-infected syringes. Another newsletter warned that “the AIDS patient” should not be allowed to eat in restaurants because “AIDS can be transmitted by saliva,” a strange claim for a physician to make.

Paul gave credence to the theory, later shown to have been the product of a Soviet disinformation effort, that AIDS had been created in a U.S. government laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Three months before far-right extremists killed 168 Americans in Oklahoma City, Paul’s newsletter praised the “1,500 local militias now training to defend liberty” as “one of the most encouraging developments in America.” And he offered specific advice to antigovernment militia members, such as, “Keep the group size down,” “Keep quiet and you’re harder to find,” “Leave no clues,” “Avoid the phone as much as possible,” and “Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”

And continues:

Paul has gone right on appearing regularly on the radio program of Alex Jones, the most popular conspiracy theorist in America (unless that distinction belongs to Paul himself). To understand Jones’s paranoid worldview, it helps to watch a recent documentary he produced, Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement, which reveals the secret plot of George Pataki, David Rockefeller, and Queen Beatrix, among other luminaries, to exterminate humanity and transform themselves into “superhuman” computer hybrids able to “travel throughout the cosmos.” There is nothing Jones believes the American government isn’t capable of, from “[encouraging] homosexuality with chemicals so that people don’t have children” to blowing up the Space Shuttle Columbia, a “textbook psychological warfare operation.”

When questioned about the content of the newsletters again by Texas Monthly in 2001, Paul — for the first time — claimed the words weren’t his and tried to distance himself from some of the more inflammatory statements.

So Paul’s newest story is that he didn’t write or see “eight or 10 sentences” of the newsletter.

What about the many conspiracies touted in the newsletters, including warnings of a Jewish takeover of the United States, claims about AK-47 wielding IRS against breaking down doors and charges that the United States would force Americans to “turn in all their money” so it could be replaced with pink currency embedded with electronic tracking capabilities?

“The money is now pink you know,” Paul said in the Thursday radio interview.

Hmmmm.

Former Paul senior aide Eric Dondero says Paul personally read and approved all the newsletters.

Paul’s campaign claims Dondero is a disgruntled ex-employee who has an ax to grind because he was fired.

Capitol Hill Blue has interviewed a number of former Paul aides who back Dondero’s story but he is — so far — the only one willing to go public.

So who can we believe?  Good question but after examining Paul’s ever-changing story on the newsletters as well as his continued alliance with fanatical conspiracy theorists and statements that suggest homophobia and anti-Semitism it is becoming more and more obvious that one person we cannot believe or trust is Ron Paul himself.

(Updated with additional material)

Related articles

• For Ron Paul, everything old is new again (capitolhillblue.com)
• In direct mail solicitation, Paul predicted ‘race war,’ touted newsletters (capitolhillblue.com)
• Ron Paul’s racist newsletters come back to haunt him (capitolhillblue.com)
• The hyprocrisy of Ron Paul and his supporters (capitolhillblue.com)
• Ron Paul’s doomsday scenarios could doom America’s future (capitolhillblue.com)
• ‘Racist newsletter’ timeline: What Ron Paul has said (csmonitor.com)
• Ron Paul, In 1996, ‘Did Not Deny’ Controversial Statement In Newsletter (huffingtonpost.com)
• Ron Paul: Yeah, I had a lot of racist and anti-Semitic stuff in my personal newsletters, but I only wrote the non-racist parts of the newsletters and not the “8-10″ sentences you don’t like. Yeah, those were written by…um…someone else. (crushliberalism.com)
• Statement From Former Ron Paul Staffer Causes More Problems For Rep. (lezgetreal.com)
• Ron Paul Touted His Controversial Newsletters In 1995 C-SPAN Interview (huffingtonpost.com)
• Ron Paul forgets the stop digging rule. Says only ’8 or 10′ sentences of thousands were offensive (dailykos.com)
• Ron Paul Denial Watch: Only ‘Eight To Ten Sentences’ Were Offensive (littlegreenfootballs.com)
• Huntsman: Ron Paul ‘Unelectable’ (usnews.com)
• Ron Paul’s 2012 Bid Wilts Under Newsletter Scrutiny (usnews.com)
• A Rankled Ron Paul Grapples With Radio Caller’s Newsletter Questions (mediaite.com)
• Ron Paul: Yea I Wrote The Newsletters, But Not Those Icky Parts (outsidethebeltway.com)
• Judd Legum: FACT CHECK: Ron Paul Didn’t Decide He Had Never Written or Read His Newsletters Until 2001 (delong.typepad.com)
• FACT CHECK: Ron Paul Personally Defended Racist Newsletters (thinkprogress.org)

Ron Paul: Who, me?

Ron Paul got a free pass from the media as long as he was a backbencher with a fringe following but when he surged in the Iowa polls, the press woke up and took a closer look at the history of the Texas Congressman.

And the Fourth Estate didn’t like what it found.

The problem, Howard Kurtz at The Daily Beast reports, is that the story was there all along.  All it took was somebody to take more than a cursory look at Paul’s background.

Writes Kurtz:

The explosive material that is fueling the negative coverage of Ron Paul, from his isolationist foreign policy to the racist newsletters published in his name, has been readily available to journalists. There was no need to assemble an investigative team to meet sources in parking garages; all that was required was a simple database search.

But in a stunning dereliction of duty, the vast majority of the press corps couldn’t be bothered.

Kurtz is right that the story has been there. Capitol Hill Blue covered it in depth in the 2008 Presidential campaingn.  The Dallas Morning News exposed Paul’s racist and homophobic newsletters in 1996.  So did the Austin American Statesman and the Texas Monthly.

So where was the rest of the media?  Asleep at the wheel (to borrow the name of one of our favorite Texas swing bands).

Kurtz continues:

We all know the media can’t walk, chew gum, and cover more than two presidential candidates at a time. All too often, journalists are like lemmings, marching in lockstep after whoever has gotten a bump in the polls. That’s why the news business has lurched from Trump to Bachmann to Perry to Cain to Newt to Paul (and perhaps now Santorum, who’s blipped up to third in Iowa in a CNN/Time survey).

But it’s not as though Paul had some hidden past that could be excavated only through dusty court records. He says stuff every day—eliminate aid to Israel, abolish the Fed, get rid of the income tax, bring American soldiers home from around the world—that would create a firestorm around any other candidate.

Of course, none of this matters to the Ron Paul faithful. They claim it’s all old news. That’s true but it became current news when the grandfather of all politicians got huffy with a CNN anchor and walked off the set because she had the gall to ask him to explain his involvement with the newsletters that padded his bank account by a million or so bucks a year.

From where we sit, Paul has not only evaded the issue for too many years, he has changed his story more often than a teenager caught breaking curfew. In other words, he lied.

Does this matter to the Ron Paul Greek chorus?  Of course not. Their candidate is Saint Paul, the political messiah who can do no wrong.  It doesn’t matter that many of his positions are so outrageous, so unworkable, so far-fetched that they would destroy the American economy, gut our defensive capabilities and push America back into the dark ages.  Ron Paul, in their eyes, is infallible and cannot be questioned.

But can a man who — as he claims — knew nothing about the racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic content of two-decades of newsletters published in his name be trusted at the helm of a nation?  Logic says no, but logic left the building long ago.

Kurtz adds:

To be sure, Paul says he never read most of what was published in the Ron Paul Freedom Report, Ron Paul Political Report, and other similarly named journals. But even if we take him at his word, the questions are obvious: Why didn’t you know? What does this say about your management skills? Why would you associate with people who would put out this filth?

That these questions are just now starting to be asked, on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, is an embarrassment for the media. And Paul’s testy responses make clear that he did not expect to have to explain these incendiary words that he now dismisses as old news.

Sorry Ronnie.  Your supporters kept complaining that the media wasn’t paying attention to you.

Well, they’re paying attention now and everything old is new again.

Be careful what you wish for.

Related articles

• The hyprocrisy of Ron Paul and his supporters (capitolhillblue.com)
• ‘Racist newsletter’ timeline: What Ron Paul has said (csmonitor.com)
• Ron Paul’s Racist, Homophobic Newsletters Find A Home On Twitter (perezhilton.com)
• Ron Paul’s doomsday scenarios could doom America’s future (capitolhillblue.com)
• Republican mainstreamers turn up the heat on Ron Paul (capitolhillblue.com)
• Ron Paul’s racist newsletters come back to haunt him (capitolhillblue.com)
• Judd Legum: FACT CHECK: Ron Paul Didn’t Decide He Had Never Written or Read His Newsletters Until 2001 (delong.typepad.com)
• FACT CHECK: Ron Paul Personally Defended Racist Newsletters (thinkprogress.org)
• How Ron Paul Got a Free Pass (thedailybeast.com)
• Ron Paul Claimed An AIDS Patient Is ‘A Victim Of His Own Lifestyle’ In 1987 Book (thinkprogress.org)
• To the GOP Establishment: Insult Ron Paul Supporters at Your Own Risk (shawnmwilson.com)

Mitt Romney: Showing strength in Iowa...maybe

A new CNN/Time poll for Iowa is good news for Mitt Romney, great news for Rick Santorum, fair news for Ron Paul and a disaster for the plummeting Newt Gingrich.

Romney has moved into a three point lead over Paul — 25 to 22 percent — which is a statistical tie when the margin of error is factored.  Santorum jumps to third with 16 percent and Gingrich continues his free-fall to 14 percent.

An early December poll showed Gingrich leading Romney 33 to 20 percent, Paul in third at 17 percent and Santorum well off the political radar at 5 percent.

Romney’s campaign took the news cautiously, continuing its strategy of keeping expectations low.  Paul’s campaign — which enthusiastically touts polls when they show their candidate in the lead — dismissed the CNN/Time survey as “meaningless,” because it questioned only Republicans while Iowans can change their registration at the door.

Santorum is gloating, saying the poll proves that people are starting to buy into his claim to the social conservatives who still haven’t made up their mind.

Gingrich, for a change, isn’t saying much.  He attacked Ron Paul Wednesday, saying the Libertarian Congressman’s views are “completely out of touch” with most Americans.

So what does it all mean?  Not much, because Iowa’s convoluted — and some might say outdated — caucus system often defies polls and pops out surprises.  It does show, however, that many potential potential Iowa caucus goers still haven’t made up their minds about the large and muddled field of GOP contenders.

“This is a race between Romney and Paul,” strategist Sharon Taft tells Capitol Hill Blue.  “A second for Romney is a win and if he takes New Hampshire as expected then he’s on the road to the nomination.  If Paul wins or comes in second, he’s still alive and remains an influence, particularly in South Carolina and Florida.”